Find out what's happening behind the scenes in the organisation that maintains Scotland's land and property registers.

DDS Q&A: Lynne Stewart @ RBS

Blog by Kevin Stewart, Digital Uptake for DDS.

To get an inside view on our online registration services, I spoke with Lynne Stewart at Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) about our Digital Discharge Service (DDS), and how lenders like RBS use the service to improve efficiency and work with both solicitors and RoS.

What have been your impressions of DDS so far?

DDS has been a positive step forward. It’s brought a number of benefits; it’s a simple and intuitive process, while having everything hosted digitally in one place brings substantial productivity savings. The digital signature functionality is another great feature – it allows us to officially approve applications digitally, which improves efficiency without compromising on security.

How do you and your colleagues use DDS?

Our process begins when we receive the digital discharge application from the solicitor through the DDS portal. If we’re happy to approve the request, we reconcile it against our records, and then automatically generate and download a draft deed, using the secure digital signature facility to approve it. At this point our side is complete, and the deed is sent to RoS for updating the land register – all in all the process can be completed in minutes. It’s a massive improvement.

Give us an idea of what goes on behind the scenes with DDS at a lender like RBS?

There’s a lot of background work for each discharge application that comes across our desks. Our systems cover operations from across the UK and beyond, so we need to ensure the information from the solicitors match our records.

We also need to ensure any transfer of funds is completed within agreed SLAs. This involves both our own internal activities and those of solicitors. It’s one of the big benefits of DDS – it allows us to process discharges quicker and within specified deadlines. If these requests come in from solicitors as close to agreed timelines as possible, it means they’re not arriving early and sitting in a queue, but dealt with efficiently for everyone involved.